Patty Murray to House GOP: End your 'hostage-taking'

By themselves, budget resolutions adopted by just one chamber mean very little and tend to invite partisan, extreme positions. But if the two sides can reach agreement to implement reconciliation instructions with real legislation, progress on the debt is possible.

Thus far, the House GOP appears wary of any advance deal and wants the Democratic-controlled Senate to commit first to some plan of its own. “Bad process frequently leads to bad legislation,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a prominent Texas conservative and veteran of many budget debates. “Good process is for the House to work its will on this budget and let the Senate work its will on its budget and then going to conference.”

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Hensarling, who worked with Murray on the famous deficit “supercommittee” in 2011, told POLITICO that he found her to be “an honest broker, a straight-shooter, somebody that I could work with….There were a number of reasons that that [the supercommittee] failed. It wasn’t for lack of effort.”

Indeed, Murray brings real political credentials often missing among budget chairs: She led the Senate Democratic campaign committee in the 2012 election cycle. And she has risen in the leadership on her ties in the once-powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.

But she has had to struggle nonetheless to be heard this week in a world of outsize egos and a White House so single-minded about its own self-interests.

Murray’s colleague Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) jumped ahead of her on Sunday television predicting the budget scenario. And the White House bought into the House’s short-term debt extension to give itself more time to promote its political messaging and install the president’s newly designated treasury secretary, Jack Lew.

That said, the budget battle shaping up is grim as House Republicans are doubling down on big cuts from appropriations as a way to force Obama to accept alternative savings from benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Discretionary nonemergency spending for the government is currently running near $1.043 trillion and could drop below $980 billion — possibly as low as $974 billion with automatic cuts due to take effect March 1. Just weeks later on March 27, the current continuing resolution that is funding federal departments, including Defense, will expire. This sets up what could be a frantic few weeks in which the GOP hopes to have added leverage to strike a deal with the White House.

Put in some historic context, the spending levels would be far lower than anything proposed before by the Republican leadership. And it’s a question of how long this strategy will work for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) given the impact on defense as well as emergency aid for the Northeast following Hurricane Sandy.

In 2011, for example, the House GOP proposed to take discretionary spending down to $1.025 trillion and rejected demands by conservatives to go much deeper — more in the range of $950 billion. Yet the post-sequester target is far closer to that earlier conservative demand and far deeper than Ryan’s own budget for this fiscal year.